Friend Request Read online

  ‘Oh, sweet.’ She couldn’t be less interested, and anyway Henry is the last thing I want to be talking about with her.

  ‘What about Tim? Tim Weston?’ I ask, as if the name has just occurred to me. ‘Do you ever see him?’

  Sophie looks at me sharply. ‘No, I’ve not seen him for years. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh, I noticed that he was listed on Facebook as going to the reunion and I know he was friends with Matt’s brother, so I thought…’ I tail off. As an introduction to the thing I want to talk to her about, it’s been a spectacular failure.

  Sophie starts listing all the others that are going, filling me in on the lives of various people of whom I’ve heard nothing since I left school in 1989. There was no sixth form at Sharne Bay High, although even if there had been there was no way I would have stayed on for it, not after what happened. I went to sixth-form college in a neighbouring town to do my A levels, and after I left home for university, I never looked back. My parents moved to Manchester to be nearer my grandparents during my first year away, so I never spent any holidays in Norfolk and didn’t keep in touch with anyone, throwing myself determinedly if unenthusiastically into university life. By the time Sam and I got together, which was well after our university days, I had completely lost touch with everyone from school, and although I knew Sam saw Matt Lewis from time to time it was very rare and I never joined him.

  Maria’s friend request sits in my stomach like a lump of undercooked pasta, preventing me from engaging fully in the conversation – not that it matters as I can barely get a word in. I have that shaky, breathless feeling you get when you know that there’s a huge conversational bomb upcoming, but the other person has no idea. I’ve got my finger in the pin of the grenade, but she can’t even see it.

  Eventually there is a lull, so I seize the moment and launch in.

  ‘Sophie, there’s actually a reason I got in touch… something I need to talk to you about.’

  ‘Yes?’ she says cautiously, taking a sip of wine.

  ‘I got a rather… strange friend request on Facebook.’ I take a beat, wanting to give myself a few more seconds of normality. Once I say it, once I let someone else in to this… whatever it is, that’s it, game over. Things will never be the same. ‘It was from Maria Weston.’

  I don’t think it’s my imagination that Sophie pales and her eyes widen for a millisecond, before she slips her mask smoothly back into place.

  ‘Oh, did you get that too?’ She laughs. ‘From the girl who drowned?’

  So it’s not just me. There’s a certain comfort in that. But surely even Sophie can’t be so heartless as to be laughing about this. The only possible explanation is that she is faking it, pretending a nonchalance that you might feel about a girl with whom you had had nothing to do, a girl whose life never touched your own.

  ‘Yes, of course the girl who drowned.’ This comes out rather more forcefully than I intended, and Sophie looks taken aback, perhaps even a little frightened, although she hides it quickly.

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’ she says, laughing again. ‘It’s obviously a sick joke, probably from someone who’s going to the reunion. I bet everyone’s had the same request.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say. This is in fact the supposition I have been clinging to for four days like a shipwreck victim to a broken piece of the hull. ‘But who would do something like that? And why me? I didn’t even know about the reunion when I got the request. Mind you, I suppose it’s obvious.’

  ‘Why obvious?’ Sophie asks, getting up from the sofa and pouring herself another glass of wine from the bottle on the coffee table without offering me one. She sits down in the armchair on the opposite side of the table and sips her drink, her face unreadable in the shadows.

  ‘You know. The way I treated her… and what we did…’ I blunder on. ‘Although hardly anybody knew about that. Did they?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Louise. I barely knew her.’ She places her wine glass firmly on the coffee table.

  I can hardly believe what I am hearing. I have lived the last twenty-seven years in the shadow of what we did, of what I did. Of course my life has carried on – I have studied and worked, shopped and cooked; I’ve been a friend, a daughter, a wife, a mother. Yet all the time, in the back of my mind, this one unforgivable act has loomed – squashed, squeezed, parcelled, but always there. The awkwardness I have been feeling all evening subsides and is replaced by anger. I thought I would be able to talk to Sophie about this.

  ‘Yes you did! You know what we did: we made her life a misery. And what about that night, at the leavers’ party?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know what you mean,’ she says with finality, standing up and picking up her glass. She bends over and takes mine although there’s still an inch of wine left in it, and moves towards the door to the kitchen, a glass in each hand. ‘Listen, it’s been really great seeing you but I’m afraid I’ll have to love you and leave you. Oh —’ she breaks off as the doorbell rings. ‘That’ll be Pete.’

  ‘Who?’ I say in confusion. I had wanted to tell her about the missing photo, and how I thought someone had been following me on the way to her flat.

  ‘Pete – my date?’ she says in response to my blank face. ‘Sorry, I did say just a quick drink, didn’t I? I’m sure I told you I wouldn’t be able to give you a whole evening.’

  She puts the glasses down, checks her face in the ornate gilt mirror hanging over the sofa, shakes her hair out over her shoulders and trips lightly down the stairs. I sit on the sofa, my face burning. How is it possible that she can still make me feel like this? I should be furious at her rudeness, but instead I feel embarrassed and foolish. I hear a man’s voice and Sophie laughing, then two pairs of footsteps coming up the stairs.

  ‘This is my friend Louise.’

  ‘Oh! Sorry to interrupt,’ says the man, looking embarrassed. He’s early forties, mid-height with closely cropped greying hair. He’s not good-looking exactly, but he looks at ease both in his own skin and in his clothes, dressed casually in black jeans and a faded blue denim shirt under a dark woollen overcoat.

  ‘Oh no, it’s no problem – she’s just leaving, aren’t you, Louise?’

  I scramble up from the sofa, red-faced, gathering up my bag in what feels like an unnecessarily scatty manner.

  ‘Yes, don’t worry,’ I say to him. ‘We were just having a quick drink. I’ve got somewhere else to be anyway. Nice to meet you.’ I offer a hand, which he shakes for a few seconds too long.

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ Sophie says, shepherding me briskly out of the room and down the stairs. In the hallway she hands me my coat and opens the door.

  ‘It’s been really fun seeing you,’ she says brightly. ‘See you at the reunion, I guess!’

  Her tone is determinedly upbeat, but I can’t help noticing that she is reluctant to meet my eye for any length of time. We say a brief goodbye and I find myself alone on the street, even more confused than I was before I went in. I am struggling to come to terms with Sophie’s rewriting of the past, although I suppose I shouldn’t be, seeing as I’ve been doing exactly that myself for years.

  I take a few paces down the road then turn to look back. Through the coloured glass in the front door I can see that Sophie doesn’t immediately go back upstairs, but is standing with her back to the door, leaning against it as if she needs the support. She stays that way, perfectly still, for thirty seconds, then, with a defiant flick of the hair, she is gone.

  Chapter 6

  1989

  Sophie didn’t mention Maria for the next few weeks, so I took my lead from her and said nothing either. I saw Maria around school, and sometimes we chatted, but I had Sophie’s words ringing in my head, I’ve heard some things about her already, so I didn’t let it go too far. I saw Maria sitting with Esther Harcourt at lunch a couple of times, both of them laughing their heads off, Esther looking happier than I’d seen her since primary school.

  Three week
s after that first encounter with Maria in the cafeteria, I was walking down the corridor when I saw her standing alone at the end of the lunch queue. I was going to have to join her, unless I turned back and didn’t go to lunch at all. Sophie had left with Claire at the end of double French without speaking to me so I assumed it was one of those days where she wasn’t going to sit with me. Maria was facing straight ahead, so I touched her arm. She jumped, and whipped round to face me.

  ‘Oh! Hello,’ she said, her eyes brightening.

  ‘Hi. How are you?’

  ‘Good, thanks. Yeah, I’m OK.’

  I could see Sophie and Claire Barnes ahead of us at the front of the queue, Sophie throwing her head back to laugh, her shining hair flying over her shoulders. I felt a sudden spurt of anger. Why should I have to sit alone on the days when she doesn’t deign to sit with me? I turned back to Maria and smiled.

  When we got to the puddings, Maria helped herself to a doughnut, so I did too. I never do that when I’m with Sophie. It was so nice to be able to have whatever I wanted. She looked a bit embarrassed when we got to the till because she had one of those tokens for free school dinners, but I pretended I hadn’t noticed.

  Before I had a chance to suggest we sat elsewhere, Maria had placed her tray down on the table behind Sophie and Claire, who were sitting with Sam Parker and Matt Lewis. I could hear them all talking about the drugs they’d taken the previous weekend. They’d gone to one of those raves they go to over on some farm near where Claire Barnes lives, where apparently everyone takes Ecstasy or speed. I’ve never been invited, not that I’d be allowed to go anyway. I remember thinking that day that I’d be too scared to take drugs, although part of me was a bit intrigued. Maria rolled her eyes.

  ‘God, people who take drugs are so BORING,’ she said, taking no trouble to lower her voice. ‘They can’t talk about anything else.’

  It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw Sophie’s back stiffen slightly.

  ‘Have you ever done anything?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve tried dope,’ I said in a low voice, barely more than a whisper. ‘It didn’t really do anything for me, apart from making me feel sick.’

  ‘Same,’ she said, grinning. ‘Like I said, boring.’

  A wave of laughter built inside me, and soon we couldn’t stop giggling, neither of us really knowing why. I saw Sophie half-looking round a couple of times, but even that couldn’t stop me. When we’d finally calmed down, Maria said, ‘I could go into town, if you like. After school? My brother’s not collecting me today.’

  She said it casually, but I could hear the hope in her voice.

  ‘Sam!’ I heard Sophie say behind us, mock-horrified. I looked over as she laughed artificially loudly and gave Sam a push on the arm. He took her hand and snaked it around behind her back, smiling lazily and looking straight into her eyes as she struggled uselessly to free it.

  ‘Get a room, you two,’ said Matt Lewis casually, but I could see the whites of his knuckles around his fork and his eyes that never left Sophie’s face.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said to Maria.

  I’d forgotten that it was the first day of the fair, and after school the market square, instead of being full of stalls selling polyester skirts and mixed nuts, was a riot of colour and lights. We wandered around looking at all the rides, competing fairground tunes jangling discordantly in our ears. Maria bought a stick of candyfloss the size of her head and I had a toffee apple, the tangy sweetness as my teeth cracked through the shiny layer of toffee giving way to disappointingly woolly blandness within. Because it was only four o’clock it was mostly little kids on the rides, but we went on the waltzers anyway, the kidney-shaped carriage spinning on its axis as the carousel turned. We staggered off afterwards, heads fuzzy and stomachs heaving, clutching each other, breathless with laughter.

  ‘Do you want to go and get a hot chocolate or something?’ Maria asked, zipping up her coat against an unseasonably chilly wind. We got the good table in the window at the Oven Door and sat in cosy, companionable silence, watching the street outside.

  ‘There’s your mate.’ Maria gestured towards the window, and there was Sophie sashaying down the pavement, mucking about and holding hands with Matt Lewis and Sam Parker. I felt a brief pang of hurt, but then Maria laughed.

  ‘My God, she’s such a slapper! What does she think she looks like?’

  ‘I know.’ I smiled, astonished at this heresy, and at my ability to find it funny. I’m not used to people laughing at Sophie.

  ‘Shall we go to Topshop?’ I asked, draining the last of my hot chocolate.

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ Maria said casually, failing to hide her pleasure at being asked.

  We took loads of stuff into the changing rooms. Maria tried to persuade me to get this bright red miniskirt but it looked awful on me. She tried on this cool trilby but she said it made her look like she was trying to be Michael Jackson. When we came out, still laughing about the hat, there was Sophie again, sitting on a bench flanked by the two boys. This time she saw us.

  ‘Hello, you two!’ She sniggered. ‘Having fun?’

  I was about to mutter something when Maria said brightly and with a certain edge, ‘Yes, thanks! You?’

  Sophie looked taken aback, then smirked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ she said, flinging a casual arm each around Matt and Sam. ‘Having loads of fun.’ Sam put his head on her shoulder and grinned up at us through half-closed eyes, but Matt held himself more stiffly, his hands placed awkwardly either side of him on the bench.

  Maria raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Mmm, looks like it. Well, if that’s your idea of fun, I know what that makes you… Come on, Louise, let’s go.’

  She seized my arm and pulled me off in the direction of her house, which we’d discovered earlier was on my way home. As soon as we were out of earshot, I turned to her, half admiring and half terrified.

  ‘What did you say that for?’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Louise, she’s such a cow. I can see that and I’ve only been here a few weeks. She deserves everything she gets. She’s just using you to make herself feel better. She needs someone who’ll hang on her every word, someone to hang out with on the days when Claire decides to ignore her. I’ve seen the way she treats you. All over you one day and then completely ignoring you the next? Deliberately flirting with the boy she knows you like?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, the flush rising up my neck belying my apparent lack of understanding. I’d obviously done a worse job than I thought of hiding my feelings about Sam. Also, no one had ever pulled me up on my friendship with Sophie before. I suppose somewhere inside I’d always known it was a bit unequal, but I thought that was the price you paid for being friends with someone popular.

  ‘Oh, come on, I’m not that stupid. You like Sam Parker, don’t you? And if I can see that already, then she definitely knows.’

  ‘Are you stalking me or something? All right, maybe I do like him,’ I admitted. ‘But only in that way where you know nothing’s ever going to happen. I think Sophie fancies him anyway; she’s not doing it to get at me. She’s right for him. They match. He would never in a million years want to go out with me.’

  ‘He might.’

  ‘No, seriously. Boys like him don’t go out with girls like me, that’s just the way it is. At the most, I might get to be friends with him. But I don’t even have that, he barely knows I exist.’

  ‘Then maybe you need to change that,’ she said. ‘You never know if you don’t try.’

  I changed the subject then. Surely even a new girl could see that Sam was totally out of my league, even if I did have the courage to do more than smile at him.

  We had such a laugh on the walk back to her house, Maria giving me her slyly observed take on various students in our year at school. For someone who’d only been in the school a few weeks she was astonishingly spot-on, identifying the frailties, insecurities and absurdities of people who to my uncritical eye had seemed
achingly cool. She also did a pitch perfect impression of Mr Jenkins asking her lasciviously to stay behind after class to ‘discuss her essay’. She hesitated outside her front gate, appearing to be involved in some kind of internal debate.

  ‘Do you… do you want to come in for a bit?’

  Inside, the hall carpet needed a hoover and was frayed at the edges, and there was a vague smell of bacon fat. The wallpaper was peeling and I could see that the handrail for the stairs had been removed, leaving a jagged groove in the wall. It was very quiet, but when Maria called out, her mum emerged from the kitchen, drying her hands on a tea towel that had seen better days. The resemblance between the two was striking: their long, wispy brown hair that fell somewhere between straight and curly, their eyes hazel pools, flecked with gold and green.

  ‘Hi! I’m Bridget,’ she said. I always feel a bit weird about calling my friends’ parents by their first names, and generally try to avoid calling them anything at all. ‘It’s so nice to meet one of Maria’s friends. Welcome!’ She flung out both arms in an exaggerated gesture, tea towel flicking against the wall. ‘So who are you?’